


Wonderland- Round Zero

by camorrsthorn



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Stolen Century Spoilers, canon-typical suffering, sadstuck but not really but yes actually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 08:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13970757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camorrsthorn/pseuds/camorrsthorn
Summary: It’s targeted, clearly-- “the Grand Relic you’ve been looking for!” It’s…Magnuswas more subtle than this.Is. Lucretia takes a sharp breath, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose. Magnus is alive, and happy. Everyone-- almost everyone is. That’s the point.--In her first, lonely hunt for the Grand Relics, Lucretia receives an invitation to Wonderland. She takes it.





	Wonderland- Round Zero

**Author's Note:**

> My brain: here's some sad shit ur welcome  
> Me, immediately: thank u i owe u my life
> 
> I haven't written in a long time apologies for rustiness and also not knowing ao3 at all

The flyer in Lucretia’s hands feels heavier than a piece of paper should. Her hands are shaking. She’s stared at the paper for a good while already, and she still can’t quite make herself understand what she’s looking at. It’s bright, bordering on garish, and frankly reminds her a little of Taako’s more questionable fashion decisions, in a way that makes her heart ache. And it has her _name_ on it. Her real name, not one of a handful of aliases she’s used. Lucretia, in big, block capitals. It… isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that someone could put her name to her face. The crew had existed in this reality for a while before… _before_ , and she’d made friends, but…

It’s suspicious. And definitely a trap. It’s targeted, clearly-- “the Grand Relic you’ve been looking for!” It’s… _Magnus_ was more subtle than this. Is. Lucretia takes a sharp breath, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose. Magnus is alive, and happy. Everyone-- almost everyone is. That’s the point. 

She takes another breath, lets it out slow and even, opening her eyes to stare levelly at the map on the wall across from her, iron in her gaze. She flips the flyer over, skipping over the ugly mish-mash font of Wonderland!! to the equally garish map. Naturally, it’s less than helpful, but it’s enough. 

Her own map is much more precise, littered with push-pins and strings of thread connecting several of them. Various colours of ink cover the map, along with notes in Lucretia’s signature shorthand. There’s an unnaturally purple dotted line traversing most of the map, looping every now and again. Leaf-green ink cautiously circling a small beach, half erased. A red circle on a small town, string connecting it to a few stories clipped from newspapers. A wine-red pin in Goldcliff. Dozens of question marks all over the map, some a bright orange, others an acid-washed blue. There are other news stories, too. Potential sightings of relics. Trails of destruction. Clues.

She’s well aware it’s a little over the top, but she’s more than willing to pin her flair for the dramatic on spending more than a century in the company of the six most dramatic idiots she’s ever had the pleasure to deal with. (There isn’t a sad, fond smile on her face, and there’s nobody around to say otherwise.)

She pins the Wonderland flyer to her map, close to the Felicity Wilds, and tracks a string connecting it to where she guesses it means. It doesn’t have to be exact, not yet. She takes out the plain, silver You Are Here pin, hovering it over the Felicity Wilds for a moment before replacing it in Goldcliff, looping another string between it and the Wonderland flyer instead. She won’t risk everything by blindly running into a trap. She won’t die before she can give the others a chance to hate her for what she did. 

\--

It takes months to do the research she needs to. Plenty of people get the flyers, all promising different things, but finding anybody who has been, who’s _survived_ , is almost impossible. It’s a relief, at least, that all of her research says she’s the only one to be promised a Grand Relic. She can’t be sure how long that will last, though. The things people have been promised are… beyond imagining. If whoever’s running Wonderland actually has these things, actually has the Animus Bell, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that eventually they might find more. At least they’d have as hard a time hunting them down as Lucretia is having. The Bell is the only thing she’s had a decent lead on since she recovered the Staff.

She asks everyone she trusts to keep an ear out for any news of what she might be walking into. It isn’t a big list, but Captain Captain Bane puts her in touch with someone who knew an apparent victor of Wonderland. Second hand information is still information, but it’s… beyond frustrating.

The Wonderland of this story is a terrible labyrinth, the prize at the center, a horde of undead foes protecting it. The Wonderland of another is an enormous chess board and a war of sentient pieces. It’s a casino, a gameshow, a nightmarish fairytale. The only thing all the stories have in common is a changeable nature, and that Wonderland is deadly.

(It doesn’t help that she’s not totally clear on what the Bell actually _does_. She’d asked, a few times, before the true extent of their mistake had made itself clear, and the only answer she’d ever gotten from Barry was “Oh, you know.”)

The months pass. The map gains new pins. Lucretia erases a little more of the green circle with a tight frown, adds another blue question mark, pins every scrap of information she has on Wonderland around the Felicity Wilds, until the Wilds turn into a sea of shorthand.

It paints a picture, eventually. Wonderland has prizes beyond imagining, genuinely and truly up for grabs, and Wonderland is deadly. The Felicity Wilds are deadly. Lucretia can _deal_ with deadly. But… not alone, not this time. She’s used to loneliness, used to working alone, but she’s just one wizard. Her hp isn’t _shit_. And, yes, she’d survived before, but the year on the judges’ planet had been the most fearful, drawn out nightmare of her too-long life, and she’d spent every moment of it soul-deep terrified of a single misstep. 

This is _worse_. She’s walking into a trap, willingly, and she _needs_ to be able to walk back out. She couldn’t die. _Couldn’t_. It wasn’t just her friends’-- _family’s_ lives on the line this time. If she-- if she died in there, they’d keep living. Their whole lifespan, unless something, maybe their own fucking Relic happened first, never remembering, and then they’d die, and everything they’d fought for for an entire century would just… end. This entire reality is counting on her walking out of there. Counting on her reclaiming the Relics and using the Light to make her shield. She couldn’t let them down. Wouldn’t.

And, anyway, she wasn’t about to let Fischer starve. 

She sank shakily into her chair, pressing her palms against her eyes until she saw stars, the enormity of it all a familiar, dreadful weight around her neck. She-- she could do this. Could, would, had. She’d just... need help, this time. A few people. Captain Bane would have recommendations. Lucretia wouldn’t ask him to come along, but he’d know adventurers. People she could trust. Maybe not enough to catch her if she fell, but enough to have her back through this. Nothing like the Starblaster crew. They could never be, nobody could, but… she didn’t want to be reminded of the wounds in her heart. Not more than necessary.

Her hands dropped into her lap, fists clenched tight, eyes open and determined. Alright. A plan was a plan was a plan.


End file.
